PURCHASE, NY.- The mesmerizing work of Tobias Putrih ushers in the Neuberger Museum of Art’s new series offering outstanding young artists from around the world their first survey exhibitions and publications.

Tobias Putrih: Quasi-Random, an exhibition organized by the Museum and opening on September 30, covers Putrih’s rich oeuvre, inspired by this Slovenian artist’s childhood experience of living in the former Yugoslavia. His subsequent critical meditation on Soviet-style social utopianism is reflected in his work, which explores the promises and failures of such powerful cultural practices as the experimental cinema, modernist architecture and design, and the positivist natural and social sciences.

“This noteworthy exhibition represents an expanded international focus for the Neuberger Museum of Art,” comments Thom Collins, the Museum’s director and curator of the show. “Few artists from Eastern Europe have caught the attention of the Western art world, but we think he’s important. The Neuberger has him fresh from his triumphant turn at the Venice Biennial.”

More than fifty works by Putrih, many of them monumental in scale, will be presented in the Museum’s Theatre Gallery. On view will be his multi-media constructs, prints, photographs, maquettes, “blueprints,” and videos. The Museum’s lobby will play host to the interactive installation Mudam Studio -- an ingenious construct, which will become a permanent fixture, functioning as the new information desk. A complex, flexible, mobile, autonomous structure, Mudam was originally created for Luxembourg’s museum of contemporary art.

“Manipulated and transformed by its users, it also presents problems that require both conceptual and logistical responses: at certain moments the structure becomes, indeed, sculpture,” writes Monica Portillo in her catalogue essay.

“Putrih’s aesthetics are engaging and compelling; he has been recognized for his influential sculpture and installations that reflect on the way individuals and societies are shaped by the cinema, architecture and the natural sciences,” Mr. Collins points out. “His investigations are realized in sculptural projects that are frequently produced through obsessive processes involving the transformation of such mundane materials as Styrofoam, packing tape, cardboard, and twist ties.” The New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman described these thought-provoking and aesthetically compelling objects as “possessing an architectural magnificence.”

Tobias Putrih was born in Kranj, Slovenia in 1973. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1997 and studied at the Kunstakademie D�sseldorf from 1997 to 1998. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at such public institutions as the Baltimore Museum of Art; PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Fredericanum, Kassel; and New Langton Arts, San Francisco. Putrih is represented by the Max Protetch Gallery, New York, and Galerija Gregor Podnar, Ljubljana. He has represented Slovenia at Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt and, most recently, at the Venice Biennial. Tobias Putrih lives and works in Ljubljana and New York City.